Blood Band Arena (08)

"I don't sssee why I have to be sssad. If anything, him joining Camra meansss I can say hi sssomeday."

"Ho, give me a minute..." Yamel's eyes couldn't stop watering after Gethu's statement, desperately wishing that what he said wasn't true. She loved money as much as a person with a superiority complex loves touting their opinions over others. She never got tired of counting coins in her spare time, as it were.

"I get what you mean, Yamel. It's quite tragic..." Gethu sighed, his dejection worsening by the second. To him, today was a time of celebration and mourning, as this would probably be the most successful the Blood Band Arena would ever be.

The only happy monster in the room was Damaris, her ivory hair swaying gently in an upwards motion. The litany of emotions the room was filled with ranged from the bowels of the underworld and the highest clouds.

—

Back in the cell.

Alban's eyes registered the dull colors of the ceiling before anything else, though he noticed he didn't feel the cold wall against his back. Surveying the area around him, he saw that Teta and Lat were still deep in slumber, the latter snoring quite loudly. Although...the two were a lot closer than he imagined they would be.

Sitting up, Alban realized that he was no longer chained so tightly to the wall. The shackles slipped around his leftmost ankle as the chain lengthened quite a bit. Due to this, he had a lot more room to move around and was currently in the center of the cell. Standing upright quickly, he lumbered back over to his previous corner. After all, there was no need to disturb his dozing comrades.

Alban sat down, this time facing the wall. He decided to try and be as quiet as he could, though he would be doing something urgent. That mouth from earlier...he was going to experiment with it. It was the only difference he got from the so called evolution he went through, and seeing as each evolution he witnessed was far from only cosmetic, the mouth must have a purpose. He just had to find it out.

His mind wandered a bit into his memories naturally, as he was searching for the sensation the toothy maw had brought onto him when it appeared. Strangely, the more he thought back onto it the emptier he felt. The hungrier he felt. And yet it wasn't the maddening hunger that eroded his patience and temperament like earlier, it felt more natural than that. Like it was a part of him?

Alban ruminated on that for a good while. He had never remembered himself as a glutton, though he did have a large appetite. The hungriest he ever got was when the odd feeling of stirring arose from his soul, but he thought it was just a want for energy. It made sense too, if you were going to change your whole entire body structure you'd need quite a bit of sustenance, wouldn't you?

Yet here he was, his stomach still beckoning towards him. To be honest, Alban never really felt full ever since he came to on the Beach of Infancy. The now undeniable monster questioned himself, wondering why that never struck him as strange? Why it still doesn't strike him as odd or peculiar even now, it just is. Pulling himself out of his thoughts, he looked down at his hands.

The right hand was different than before, the mouth greeting Alban's inquisitive eyes. The mouth was very familiar to him, though he had no idea why. As the young man stared at the opening unmoving, he willed the mouth to open. He wanted to see just how similar it was to the orifice it so closely resembled.

Gleaming white fangs as sharp as his own, and a bright pink tongue to match— those were the only similarities it had. There was nothing other than that, the only other parts being a yawning black aperture that seemed to extend into nothingness. Alban wished he has not torn through the corpses in his inventory, as he could've thrown something down there to see what would happen.

As he was looking through his inventory he noticed that he still had some Eimharr Cloud beads, the spherical lumps of mana shining dimly. He took one out from the black panel that was his inventory and tossed it into the mouth, and instantly felt energized. He tasted the creamy soda flavor that came with the bead, noting that whatever ends up in the mouth on his hand he would taste as well. Intrigued even further, he became curious as to how many mouths he could have at once.

Though focusing on another hand would be quite simple, Alban decided to take it a step further. What if he was busy lobbing earth spikes or fireballs through his hands? Wouldn't the mouth be ineffective that way? Besides, if he could hide it on his abdomen or something it could serve as a kind of sneak attack...Alban was getting excited.

And so he focused the famished feeling that came with the mouth on his abdomen. To his surprise, the orifice disappeared from his right palm entirely before appearing on his stomach. He was a bit disappointed that it didn't seem like he could have more than one, but the sneak attack was still up for grabs. That fact gave him a little solace, though he couldn't shake the fact that he felt as if he was missing something.

Suddenly, one of the fuzzy new memories that lurked in the depths of his mind became clear and brought itself to Alban's attention. The scene was very dark, with only a pale light focusing on the palm of a hand that looked much like his. There was a mouth on it's surface as well, though the mouth started extending before long. The orifice itself soon disappeared, leaving a small black hole in the center of the person's hand. The perspective panned out a little, and what Alban saw left him in awe.

The hand's texture no longer resembled flesh, but instead had the surfaces of bone. Each and every finger was white and pointedly sharp at the tip, though their shape was retained. The bone stretched down until it reached the circular black opening, while the bottom was pink and resembled the tongue that the mouth originally had. The memory ended soon after.

Alban felt confused about the nature of that memory, though he felt like it was a reminder. What he had to do now was apparent to him, his rarely used intelligence rapidly connecting the puzzle that lay inside him. Whatever that memory was, it didn't matter. What mattered was that what he saw, he could replicate—he *should* replicate.

It didn't take Alban any longer than a minute to do as he remembered. His hand quickly morphed into what he had seen, the flesh of his hand wriggling into the black opening that spanned from his palm to the back of his hand. What was left in it's place were toothy claws and a soft pink texture, his hand completely changed. As Alban prodded at the bottom half of his new (?) hand, he realized that the lowest portion of his hand really *was* his tongue. It felt a bit harder than he thought it would, though it was pliant in it's own way. Bringing his leftmost hand down onto the pink flesh, he realized that his sense of pain was almost nil no matter how hard he hit it.

'Interesting.' The young man wondered what he would be able to do next, almost completely negligent to his surroundings. It was just enough for Lat to wake up, unnoticed. The young gheckla rose from his slumber with a determined look on his face, his mind made up. He was going to tell Alban what happened and why he wants to follow him, no matter what happens.